Chicago jazz pianist John Wright earned his reputation with a string of LPs for the Prestige label in the early 60s —his 1960 debut made such an impression that its title, South Side Soul, remains his nickname to this day. His discography has been sparse since then.

John Wright was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1934, and his family came to Chicago in 1936. His father became a stockyard worker, and his evangelist mother opened a Pentecostal church on West Roosevelt; in the early 1940s, the family moved to the south side. (Wright later learned that his father's real last name was Washington, and that for decades he'd been a fugitive from a chain gang. "He told us that he'd killed 13 peckerwoods and one black," says Wright. "And the only thing we asked him was, 'Was it justified?' He said yes.") By age three Wright was picking out melodies on the piano, and by seven he was playing in his mother's church. His siblings studied piano formally, but as Wright remembers it, their instructor refused to give him lessons, telling the family they'd be wasting their money. "Whatever we play, he plays equally as well," the teacher said. "He's not reading music, he's not using the right fingers, but he has God's gift... he can play everything he hears."

At age 12, Wright fell under the spell of a neighborhood Baptist choir —its gospel music was far livelier than Pentecostal hymns. With his mother's permission, he began playing piano for that congregation's youth choir; after the organist was drafted, he became the church's principal accompanist. Blues and jazz were banned in the Wright household, as were movies, checkers, cards, and records of any kind. But Wright characterizes his childhood as happy and full. He played baseball and sneaked into Comiskey Park to watch games from atop the dugout (as an adult he'd be invited to sit in on the Comiskey organ), and he remembers having Boy Scout meetings in the same church where Thomas Dorsey was rehearsing his choir.

When Wright was 15, he heard jazz coming out of a tavern at 35th and Indiana called Smitty's Corner. Each night he stood outside for hours, till eventually he worked up the nerve to borrow one of his brother's suits, pencil on a mustache, and stroll in. "On intermission," he recalls, "I went up to the piano and started playing something. I had an audience, but they knew I didn't know what I was doing. They didn't put me out, though. They told me to sit down and gave me a Coke."

In the early 50s his jazz education took a more serious turn when he befriended Jody Christian, a classmate at Wendell Phillips High School, and started going to jam sessions with him. "When I really heard it, and saw how musicians were treated," Wright says, "I made a vow: I was going to play jazz, drink plenty of whiskey, and chase pretty women. I kept that vow, and it almost killed me."

The Korean War broke out in 1950, and in '52 Wright and eight friends decided to forgo their senior year of high school and enlist. Upon entering the army, to his surprise Wright was separated from his comrades, and they were all later killed in combat. He'd never told recruiters about his piano prowess, but he was shipped to Europe, where he was made part of Special Services, the military's entertainment branch.

Wright was allowed to ditch his uniform, and he spent the next three years playing jazz for soldiers on R&R in Germany, London, and Italy. Though he knew few of the songs expected of him, he faked his way through —and by playing alongside stars such as Marshall Allen and Billy Mitchell of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Count Basie trombonist Frank Hooks, and Art Blakey arranger Tom Mc­Intosh, he earned the real-world equivalent of a PhD in jazz. Wright fell for a German woman and planned to remain in Europe, but when his mother learned he'd impregnated a different girlfriend before leaving Chicago, she ordered him home, insisting that they marry.

Upon returning in 1955, Wright fell easily into Chicago's jazz scene, where the C&C Lounge, the Grand Ballroom, McKie's Disc Jockey Show Lounge, and countless other happening spots flourished. He was alternating between bass and piano at the time, and soon found himself playing nine-hour sets for union scale (often less than $10). But Wright's versatility and talent didn't go unnoticed, and he landed a full-time gig at the Randolph Rendezvous with Jelly Holt's Four Whims, entertaining white downtown conventioneers and earning hundreds of dollars a night in tips. In 1960 a scout from New York label Prestige Records gave Wright a plane ticket, and soon he was playing a Steinway grand for the first time in Rudy Van Gelder's famous private studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Working with bassist Wendell Roberts and drummer Walter McCants (the first of several lineups called the John Wright Trio), in a single day he improvised an album's worth of grooving tunes based in 12-bar blues. Wright had officially become a recording artist, and South Side Soul was the first of five soul-jazz LPs he'd cut between 1960 and 1962.

When I first saw the South Side Soul LP, my reaction was skepticism. The cover art is so intriguing and aesthetically perfect that it looks like a fictional record, maybe dreamed up by a gifted prop designer for a movie. The sepia-tinted black-and-white photo, the eye-grabbing design, even the fact that the album is called South Side Soul, with song titles referencing hot spots such as "63rd and Cottage Grove" or "45th and Calumet"—everything contributes to this too-good-to-be-true vibe. Most of all, it comes from Wright's face. Handsome, youthful, and rugged, he's shown in profile with an impressive "conk" hairstyle (his half-Irish mother gifted him "good hair"). His eyes have the weariness of a man twice his age, and his furrowed brow mars the calm, sculptural beauty of his features. The cover seems disconcertingly perfect even after you put the LP on your turntable, making it impossible to deny that you're dealing with a real album—an album that swaggers hard. The stellar cuts on South Side Soul were no fluke, either: Wright would scale those heights again, notably on the title track of 1961's Makin' Out and "Strut" from 1962's Mr. Soul [...]

Wright continued to perform on the Chicago club scene and worked as a librarian at the Cook County Jail from the mid 1980s until 1999. In 1994, he recorded a final album Wright Changes & Choices. In 2008, Wright was inducted into the Wendell Phillips High School Hall of Fame, and in 2009 he was awarded the Walter Dyett Lifetime Achievement Award by the Jazz Institute of Chicago.

Wright died in late 2017, and tribute concerts were performed in his memory at the 2018 Chicago Jazz Festival and 2018 Hyde Park Jazz Festival.

Jake Austen -Chicagoreader.com